The truth about council property valuations

by Chris Lang on April 24, 2008

I must admit, reading this article about council property valuations totally shocked me. Apparently anyone who thinks that the local council valuates every single property in their area is wrong. I knew that council’s valuations are made once every two years (and therefore the numbers won’t stay accurate for much longer) but had no idea that they take another “shortcut”.

According to Greville Pabst (CEO and Director of WBP Property group), council has all of the properties classified (by building size, land size, etc). Instead of valuating every property they take sales data of 3 months before and 3 months after the valuation date, analyze it, and see how much property of certain type went up in price since the last valuation. Then they apply this value to work out how much they need to add to the previously recorded value. Only 10% of the properties are actually inspected and re-valuated in every municipality – not much, ha?

Anyway, that doesn’t mean that we should disregard council valuations – just take it with a grain of salt.